Kevin Hart gets personal in fiery, funny show

By the time Kevin Hart came out for the first of two shows Saturday night at the Milwaukee Theatre, smoke machines had been working long enough to make the stage (and a good portion of the rest of the venue) hazy.

To mark his entrance, fire pots flamed up on either side of him.

These were the trappings of a music superstar, and Hart is a stand-up comedian. Fortunately, he understood the funny side.

"Didja see my fire?" Hart said, flashing the kind of knowing, high-wattage grin that Chris Rock has long used to put an extra sting in his jokes. "Means I'm a big deal."

Inspired by Kanye West's use of similar stage effects, Hart cued the flames to flare up throughout the show, whenever he felt like it: a whimsical tendency that could not be attributed to West.

As Hart got down to the serious business of his comedy, he didn't resemble West in the slightest, but his delivery and subject matter did have some likenesses to the aforementioned Rock (the stage-strutting confidence, the repetition of key lines) and Chris Tucker (the sudden bursts of hyperactivity and noise).

However, Hart spent a lot of his routine being quite personal, starting with a riff on his 2011 divorce and why that happened: "Lying ruined my marriage. That's a lie: I cheated."

Not for nothing, then, was his last tour called "Laugh at My Pain" and this one "Let Me Explain."

For most of the show, Hart did explain himself.

He explained his dishonesty ("I love to lie"), his enlistment of friends to back up his alibis ("My BS is your BS," although he didn't use the abbreviation) and his understanding that when women call him and other men on their lies, "99% of the time, (they're) right."

He tightly capped those explanations with the conclusion that men "live for the day we can make (women) look dumb"; that is, the other 1% of the time.

Yet Hart's wildly expressive face and body got their best workouts when he let his mind run away, such as when he turned his own greatest fear - "bum hands scare me" - into a fantasy of how someone would overreact if his lips were suddenly strummed by a homeless person.

By the time Hart ended his show, he was sitting on his stool in an undignified but hilarious position (as part of a story about riding a horse with another man), proving that while he has the star trappings, he definitely has no star attitude.